


from here, oblivion

by Victorian_Asylum



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Modern AU for absolutely no reason, Molly related angst, Some Beau/Yasha but it's not the main focus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 22:14:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17333357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victorian_Asylum/pseuds/Victorian_Asylum
Summary: Yasha is silent for the longest time, then, “Are you afraid of dying, Beau?”“No. Yes. I don't fucking know Yash. Does it matter?” Beau exhales harshly, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.“I suppose it doesn’t, but that’s not for me to decide, I think.”orBeau must deal with the aftermath.





	from here, oblivion

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, first fic of 2019. Cheers!
> 
> I was working on this off and on again for a few weeks, but most of it was written before the Yasha lore drop. I think it's vague enough to still hold up, though.

Beau can still feel the stinging in her knuckles, the rush of blood in her ears. The way her heart beats off rhythm in her chest cavity, radiates into her arms and her throat. She thought she might actually feel something meaningful, but everything is muted, sensations through a cotton wall. She sits on the bench, alone in the park, watches her outstretched hands, the way they shake, the way blood drips from cuts and scrapes down onto the pavement. It’s orange in street light, but she knows its bright red. Fresh and newly oxygenated, never to reach its final destination, to complete its journey, to help those around it. Millions of cells that will die on the ground, away from home.

Beau exhales, long and shaky, and slowly clenches her fists, squeezes them tight in a way she knows should hurt but it just doesn’t. It doesn’t. “Fuck,” she whispers, tears pricking at her eyes, threatening to form like a tidal wave built up after so many years without release. She gives a small, wheezing laugh that turns into a cough. It was stupid. It was all so stupid and fragile, like a balloon held against a flame. Waiting to pop. To explode in a ball of fire that threatens to consume everything you know. And that’s exactly what it was doing, eating up everything. Or maybe it was just her. Maybe it was already here, breaking open her ribs to get at the organs inside, feasting on a pain that should be there but isn’t, taking precious things instead.

She has always been closed off to the world, built walls, then castles, moats and armies around herself, sealing herself away like nuclear waste in part because she was as dangerous to others as she was to herself. It was easier that way, people not having any hold over her. That was too much power for someone, she didn’t understand how so many people could just give it away. How they were okay with that. How they could let others stab them in the back and act surprised, as if they never saw it coming. Not everyone intentionally stabs you in the back. Not everyone does it out of malice. He didn’t. That’s what made it so much worse. Beau let people in, little by little, without even realizing it. By the time she did, it was too late. The knife was there and she didn’t even notice, just stood there touching the blood on her chest.

Beau knows she is delaying the inevitable, so she rises to her feet, pulling her phone out of her pocket and dialing a familiar number.

It rings once, twice, three times, then, “Beau?”

“Hey…. Yasha. Can I crash at your place?”

“Of course.” There is the sound of sloshing water on the other end. Is she taking a bath? “Is- is everything alright?”

Beau chuckles, though it comes out darker and more broken than she wanted. “I don’t know Yash. I’ll see you in a few.” And she hangs up. She pulls a pack of cigarette out of the inside pocket of her jacket, takes one out, puts it in her mouth. She produces a lighter from her jeans, holds the flame against the end until it catches. She takes a long drag, rubs at her eyes, then she starts to walk. It is only a short way to Yasha’s. Beau has been heading there. She didn’t have a plan B.

Outside the door to the apartment, she drops the cigarette, smothering it with her feet before she goes inside, through the dimly lit stairwell to the second floor, where she knocks on Yasha’s door. After a moment, it opens, Yasha standing on the other side in a bathrobe, arms and legs still damp. She looks Beau up and down but says nothing, stepping aside and letting Beau in.

Beau nods in thanks and crosses the room to the kitchen, grabbing the half empty bottle of whiskey on the counter and a glass, pouring herself some and knocking it back. She stands there with her hands on the counter, looking down at the fake marble. “How do you do it?” She asks.

“Do what?”

“I don’t know, keep- keep moving forward. Keep going?” Beau turns around, abandons the glass for the bottle, leans against the countertop, free arm tucked over her chest. Its defensive. Its safe. If the personality doesn't keep you away, the bad habits will. If that fails, there’s always a fist. 

Yasha is sitting on the arm of the couch, legs crossed. Her expression is soft. Under any other circumstance, it would have knocked Beau off her feet but now it just feels like pity and it burns. “I don’t know Beau. You just do. You find…. Something to pull you forward.”

“But why? Why do I feel like this, like this empty pit of fucking nothing. I didn’t know him, didn’t get close to him like everyone else did. I hated him. I hate Molly.” That wasn’t true. Not even a little bit. But hate and anger were easier than admitting the truth, that his stupid rainbow ass had gotten under her skin. She drinks. “So why? Why any of this?”

“Death is… death is hard, Beau.”

“No, its not. It easy. That's the problem, isn't it?” Beau begins to pace, back and forth across the kitchen, gesturing wildly. No, rabidly, like an animal backed into a corner. “It’s really fucking easy. One day you’re there, and the next day you’re not. You’re nothing, alone in the nothingness. It didn't matter who you were, what you were doing. Its gone. I hated Molly, but he didn’t deserve to get his life snuffed out like that. That’s bullshit. Death is bullshit and it’s easy. And it's coming for you, for Jester, for Nott, for everyone. It's coming for me and it could be just as senseless and young and brutal because nothing I ever did in my entire life can stop it. So how do you keep going, knowing that?”

Yasha is silent for the longest time, then, “Are you afraid of dying, Beau?”

“No. Yes. I don't fucking know Yash. Does it matter?” Beau exhales harshly, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.

“I suppose it doesn’t, but that’s not for me to decide, I think.” Yasha looks at Beau, at this destructive mess that barged into her home, bleeding and wounded and lost. Her eyes wander to Beau’s hands. “You’ve been fighting.”

Beau glances down at them. The blood had begun to congeal and coagulate, to harden into scabs. They’re in bad shape, just like she is, although it feels like she is still waiting to scab over. Like she is still raw and bleeding. “Yeah. You gonna try to tell me I shouldn’t?”

Yasha shakes her head. “No. You need to wash the wounds. They’re dirty. You won’t want them to get infected.” She rises, and heads towards the hallway, motioning for Beau to follow. “Come.”

Beau trails after her, down the hall and to the bathroom opposite her bedroom. Yasha flips on the light and orders Beau to sit on the edge of the tub. Condensation clings to the mirror and steam sill curls in the air, remnants of an interrupted bath. Yasha rummages through the medicine cabinets, then the drawers, pulling out antibiotic cream and a first aid kit. She holds a cloth and stands before Beau, waiting for her to hold out a hand, and when Beau does, Yasha crouches down and begins to scrub away the blood and the dirt. It’s quiet, methodical work, entirely too tender. Beau wasn’t sure she deserved it. The world don’t give any tenderness, so why should she receive it? She, of all people. Beau swallows past the growing lump in her throat and instead watches Yasha work.

She is calm and focused, washing away traces of battle with slow strokes and steady hand. There were scars on them, silver and knotted and storied, some Beau knew, and some she likely never would. Yasha is and always will be a book of many secrets. For all the languages Beau knew, there would always be one she could never read, and those passages were kneeling in front of her, cleaning her hands. “I do it too, you know.” Yasha says, without looking up from her work. “Fighting through my anger. My hurt. I take it to the gym. Try to leave it there.”

“Does it work?” Beau asks, hating how hopeful her voice is.

“Sometimes. For the longest time, my trainer would not let me fight in any matches. Said I was too volatile.” Yasha sets the cloth aside and grabs the cream, dabbing some onto her fingers before rubbing them across the cuts. “I wanted to fight. To let all that rage out, but that is not the kind of anger you bring into the ring. I knew it. My trainer knew it.”

Beau can feel the sting seeping through her wounds, tingling all throughout her hand. “You sound like Xenoth. Always said emotions had a time and a place and a purpose, but they should never cloud your mind. Pissed me the hell off whenever he did.”

Yasha begins to wrap the wounds. “I’m not giving a lesson. Or advice. I won’t tell you you’re right or wrong for feeling this pain and dealing with it the way you are. What I’m saying is that I understand.” She finishes, and her hands rest over Beau’s for a moment, steady and warm and encompassing. “Just… don’t let it destroy you.”

Beau has studied Yasha and her mannerisms long enough to know there was something personal in that statement. She could see a memory clouding Yasha’s mismatched eyes, like a roiling storm. Her stare is vacant, settling on a point through Beau’s chest and into the past. It’s a look Beau knows well. She’s seen it on every last one of her friends these past few months. She’s probably worn it herself.

Beau can’t promise much of anything right now, and honestly, what is better? The bitter truth or a sweet lie. She knows that answer, but settles for a halfway point regardless. “I’ll try.”

The words draw Yasha back to the present, and she offers a small, wistful, blink-and-you-miss-it smile. “Good. Good.” She rises to her full height, adjusting her robe. “Do you want to get cleaned up? I can run a shower or…”

“A bath would be stellar, actually.” A chance to sink into something that could soothe her aches, if only the ones on the outside, didn’t sound too bad. Beau looks at the floor, at her ragged, half-untied boots. “You can join me, if you want. I know I probably cut yours off.”

A long silence follows, long enough for Beau to worry she had overstepped her boundaries, before Yasha says, “I would like that, I think.” She moves to Beau’s side, crouching down to turn on the faucet, holding a hand beneath the water until the temperature is satisfactory, and she pulls the stopper to let it fill. “There’s bubble bath, should you want it.” She points to the small bottle of purple liquid on the far rim of the tub. She stands. “I’ll get you a change of clothes.” Yasha exits the bathroom.

Beau leans down, unlacing her boots with shaking fingers, pulling them off and discarding them. She rises to her feet, unzipping her jeans and pulling them down and off her legs, taking her socks with them. She takes her jackets off, pulls her sweatshirt over her head, then her shirt, discards it in the growing pile. Beau glances, briefly, at her reflection in the mirror, at the lithe, coiled muscle bunched beneath bruised skin. Walking armor in humans clothing, both a shield and a weapon. Her father had thought martial arts would teach her discipline, patience. Instead, it taught her how to mask herself, how to crush her own emotions down so far they might never have existed at all. And now, these things, the feelings so foreign and unfamiliar that slipped past her, burned with a righteous fury. She felt, and it hurt. Scorched all within and she did not know how to make it stop, so it shimmered and smoldered within, a single spark in the coal mine of her mind, destined for an eternity of flames.

Beau pulls off her bra and underwear and drops them to the floor, moving toward the bath and stepping in before slowly sinking down, into the steaming water, and for a moment it feels like a glimmer of rebirth, pulled from the primordial nothingness by the hands of the gods, before the moments fades, and she is alone with her thoughts of the inevitable oblivion beyond the veil of her own mortality. The void in which he fell. In which they all will fall, as simple as missing the last step on a staircase. You think you have more time, but you don’t, and there is no way to catch yourself, no floor to stumble onto, no railing to grasp. Just you, then nothing. And he was in that nothingness. All that talk of a new life, of making things better, of changing lives and starting over, all gone. Vanished into thin air. Snuffed like a candle, like it never really mattered anyway.

Yasha returns with a small pile of clothes, and sets it on the countertop. She leaves the door open, almost absentmindedly, a habit that didn’t quite matter either way now that she was alone in this place, but one that stuck nonetheless. She unties her robe and opens it, setting it on a hook on the wall. Beau watches her out of the corner of her eye, turning the water off when the tub fills up enough. She is careful to keep her hands dry and above the water line.

Yasha gets in behind her, trying to find space for her legs. The tub is nowhere near big enough for her, and is quickly crowded with two people. She moves her legs on either side of Beau, bent at the knee just to fit. She does not ask about bruises, old and new, or scars she does not remember. “Do you want me to wash your back?”

Beau nods. A few moments of rustling, of caps being opened and closed, and cold touches her back, between her shoulder blades. Behind it is a calloused hand, impossibly warm. Yasha works the body wash into a lather, a mix between a wash and a massage. She finds knots upon knots in Beau’s shoulders, works them out with gentle fingers and Beau melts just a little more. Yasha cups her hands, draws water up and over Beau’s backing, washing off the soap, before continuing the massage. The softness is starling after the day she has had, and it sticks in her throat. All this tenderness in the wake of tragedy. What will become of it? Teetering on the edge as they are, could she and Yasha ever become more than this? Did they know how to stop being solitary creatures and begin to acknowledge that they wanted to carve out their own little space in the universe - together?

When Yasha finishes, Beau leans back against her, and Yasha wraps her arms around her, resting her hands on the tops of Beau thighs. Beau could feel her heartbeat against her back, the steady breathing of the seemingly unshakable titan that was Yasha. But she could be shaken. More than that, she could be brought to her knees, not by the hands of gods or mortals, but by the unfathomable anguish of loss. Loss of someone no one had ever or could ever know as well as she had. Her other half. Her cherished friend. Yasha had seen oblivion and it had changed her. What hope did Beau have?

“Have you done this before?”

“I have… known death, yes,” Yasha answers, slowly, carefully.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Beau says. “I’m not looking to pick at old wounds I’m just- everyone else seems to have dealt with some kind of life altering event. Some kind of loss. I feel like I’m just stumbling around getting fucking gut punched by that shitshow of a day.”

Beau knew about death. She had read about it six ways to Sunday at the monastery, in multiple languages. She had gone through the classes upon classes of every philosophical dissection of death with a practiced nonchalance, an air of disdain. She had answered the way she knew the monks wanted her to, detached from it all, because who the fuck even cared, she was basically a god. Except her self imposed divinity couldn’t save her friend. He still broke and bled and no holy touch could put him back together again.

Beau knew about death, but she hadn’t known death. 

People die all the time and the world still turns, the seasons still change, so clearly she must be missing something fundamental or she would be moving forward by now. Wouldn’t feel godsdamned hollow inside. So scooped out and gutted and numb and burning all at the same time. “That piece of shit took something from me. I want it back.” Beau says, fingers bunching into fists. It was left unspoken, but still rang in her heart, the silent question of: when do I get it back? Molly was self-righteous and insufferable, but he was one of the best of them. He had a rare chance to do his life over, to become a better person and he embraced that role to the end. He was a good person in a way Beau could likely never be and he did not deserve his fate. The world stole a light that could never be relit. 

Yasha says nothing, but Beau didn’t expect her to. No one has the answers because nobody knows. Everyone handles loss differently, and Beau, it seems, completely falls apart. She leans her head back against Yasha’s chest, tucks herself just beneath the woman’s chin. They sit together in silence. It’s hard to imagine that at 23, this is where Beau is at in life. Such a crazy journey it was that got her here. Here, of course, is relative. Here here prickled like a fresh burn, but maybe the next here wouldn’t. Maybe the next here would be kinder to all of her friends.

“Yash, I don’t know if I’m afraid of death, but I know that this whole thing made me realize how meaningless my life has been. How unnecessarily selfish my actions are.” Beau closes her eyes. “Like, I can see the oblivion waiting for me on the other end of the veil, but measured up to that, everything I’ve done doesn’t fucking matter, y’know? So like, why not try to not be so shitty, i guess. If life is just a series of meaningless choices, why not make a good one?”

“You sound just like him,” Yasha says, voice soft. “I think Molly rubbed off on you.”

“Yeah well, never woulda told him that. His ego was too big already.” Maybe it was just that. Maybe all the people she met had changed her, shown her what she was missing. Molly could do some shitty things and sometimes be a shitty person but he still tried to do right, so perhaps there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person. You could just be a person trying to do good. But a person doing good and a person doing bad still die the same. Their graves are the same. That same nothingness claims them, erases them. Is that what really gets under Beau’s skin, or is it her newfound hyper awareness that at any time, her friends can be taken in the blink of an eye? One moment there, the next moment gone.

Beau feels something akin to molten glass bubbling up in her throat and she sits up, eyes open. Objectively, she knows exactly what this is. The inbetween stages of being ignorant of death, and being at peace with it. The growing pains of a mortal existence. Personally though, it is a lot fucking worse than the monks made it out to be. Like it was supposed to be easy. Like she was supposed to be okay with the transient lives of everyone she ever cared about. Like she was supposed to accept that everyone died when they were meant to. She wasn’t. She didn’t. This infinitesimal sliver of existence in the great sea of time is all anyone ever has and yet the universe can’t seem to spare a single lifetime and she’s supposed to take that lying down?

Unable to stand being in one place any longer, Beau gets out of the tub and towels off, quick and messy. Yasha follows a few moments after, draining the tub and drying off with more patience. Beau puts on her underwear and a borrowed shirt three sizes too big and leaves, heading to Yasha’s room. It’s dimly lit from the hallway light, not that it matters. Yasha was a minimalist when it came to design. Given how rarely she was home, it likely didn’t matter much what her room looked like. Beau goes over to the bed, turning on a small lamp on the nightstand. She feels restless and undone, her mind a tangled and ugly thing. When Yasha enters the room, pausing for a moment at the doorway, Beau locks eyes with her and doesn’t break contact, even as they both move and meet at the foot of the bed. Beau grabs two handfuls of Yasha’s shirt. Yasha gently puts her hands on Beau’s waist.

“Something the matter, Beau?” She asks.

“I want some fucking quiet,” Beau says, tugging on Yasha’s shirt until they both fall onto the bed. “I don’t want to think right now.” Beau is so close to begging it’s almost sad.

Yasha watches her with discerning eyes for the briefest of moments, before ducking her head and kissing Beau. Its soft and sweet but not what Beau needs, so she kisses back with an unbridled ferocity that Yasha quickly matches. It is an outpouring of emotions neither one could ever fully articulate, all bottled up and left in the dark in the hopes they might one day disappear. Perhaps it is selfishness on Beau’s part, but there were very few things that could silence the incessant thoughts in her mind, and this was the least self destructive. She finds solace under Yasha, in harsh touches and searing kisses, in a bruising grip on her hips, face down in the mattress. She finds reprieve, a moment to lose herself in her basest desires, to turn off her mind and attune herself to the feeling of Yasha’s skin against hers, white hot.

After, they lay side by side in messy sheets, half tangled around their legs. Beau is on her side, and Yasha is behind her, tracing the tattoo on the back of her neck with something that resembled reverence. Yasha would look at it quite a bit, with a misty eyed fondness mixed with great anguish. It was the longest Beau had ever deliberated on anything. For a while, she thought the idea was the dumbest crock of shit to ever bounce around her brain. Soon, though, she rationalized that Molly was dead, so it didn’t even matter if she ripped off one of his tattoos. Unlike her piercings, which were all frivolous and spur of the moment, her one and only tattoo was a conscious, deliberate thought. Part memorial, part reminder of her dedication to exposing the dirty truths of the world. 

She knows Yasha sees it as a small fraction of Molly still in this world, loses herself in memories when she focuses hard enough on it. Beau thought it would bother her, being a vessel of someone’s ghost, but it doesn’t, not really. Beau watches the shifting moonlight cast again the wall, shadows of trees branches shifting in the mild wind outside. Yasha’s fingers are rough against her neck, her breathing soft. The air conditioning rumbles. It is almost domestic in its quiet way, and Beau’s heart aches at the idea that this is what they could have had. She hates it, hates the feeling in her chest, hates that even after all these months she still expects to walk out into the kitchen in the morning and see Molly’s stupid smug face and shiteating, knowing grin. It’s suffocating. Beau clenches her fists for the briefest of moments, feels the telltale sting of cut skin stretched out over knuckles. It is oddly grounding in a way Beau knows she cannot allow herself to get used to. It reignites a simmering anger. “Are you afraid of death, Yash?” She asks, forcing her voice to be low and neutral.

Yasha is silent for a moment, fingers stilling. “No,” she answers, and the word hangs in the air before she continues, “death is part of this world. It is natural and inescapable. There is nothing for me to fear.”

“That’s… peppy.” Beau rolls onto her back. Not that she expected anything different. Yasha was afraid of nothing. There wasn’t a single thing on earth, heaven or the nine hells that could shake her. Beau thinks she can say the same. Maybe she can. Maybe she can’t. But that isn’t the point, not really. 

“You asked. Death is not an uplifting topic.” Yasha lays her hand on Beau’s stomach, fingers splayed across the space where her true ribs end and her false ones begin.

The weight of Yasha’s hand is heavy, a tether to this moment to keep Beau from floating away entirely and getting lost in the idea of it all. Beau was never very good at emotions, at being open and available. It’s why relationships of any kind tended to wither around her, despite her best efforts. Yasha was different. Or, perhaps it would be easier to say she was the same, unsure of what to do with her own emotions, how to express herself. They were both terrible in that aspect, so they could completely understand each other. Beau didn’t have to try to find words to explain what was happening. Yasha knew it was hard and that’s all that mattered.

Beau turns her head and looks at Yasha, her messy, tangled hair and beautiful eyes framed by long, dark lashes. It doesn’t change anything, but there is some comfort to be found in sharing a moment with someone going through the same loss, the same pain. “Does this ever stop, Yash? This fucking…. emptiness inside me.”

“That’s not an easy answer.” Yasha draws inane patterns on Beau’s skin with her forefinger. “It comes and goes. Sometimes you think you’re fine until suddenly something comes along and then you aren’t anymore.”

“Fuck Molly. Everything was easier when I hated him.” And it was. Not that she ever really hated him. That was reserved for her parents and aristocrats and that mean old cat in her home town who’d clawed her legs to ribbons when she was a child. She had disliked him immensely, that was for certain. Found him tacky and aggravating and insufferable, until one day it seemed less like a reaction a more like a dynamic. Like some of the siblings she’d play with as a kid. They’d punch and kick and tear each other apart but at the end of the day they’d laugh and make up. Was that what the pair of them were like? The thought would have made Beau from months past gag, but now it simply makes everything all the more clear. The hurt and the anger and the emptiness. Losing something important will do that, she has since learned. What a shitty lesson it was.

Beau inhales slowly, through her mouth. It would be easy to blame herself for not being able to stop it, but for all she could do, she can’t tear apart the fabric of reality to be in a space she isn’t. She couldn’t reach him, and that’s just the way it was. She exhales. Molly may have had the final say, may have finally one upped her by saving her life, trading his for her own. She imagines she could sit here forever and never change, just to spite him. But she could also throw him a middle finger, swallow her pride and live her life for the better. It didn’t feel possible right now, and maybe it wasn’t, but perhaps the future could prove her wrong. After all, she had nothing left to do but try.

Beau raises a hand above her head, stares at the careful wrapping, stark white against her dark skin. “I’m still fucking pissed about it,” she says. “Pissed and so much other shit I don’t even want to think about. But I trust you.” She drops her hand, threads her fingers through Yasha’s and lets their intertwined hands rest stop her stomach. “If this gets better, then that’s what I’ll work towards. Getting better. Being better.”

When Beau turns her head, she catches a glimpse of Yasha’s smile in the dark. It’s as much of a start as anything, she supposes. They’ve been through a lot, and they’re still here. Beau imagines they can go through a lot more. This was a blow, certainly, and it knocked her right on her ass, but Beau can take a hit. She knows how to get back up again. She’ll be okay. They’ll be okay. 

It will be okay.


End file.
